


The Black Cannibal

by gardnerhill



Series: 221b Ficlets by Gardnerhill [21]
Category: Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Colonialism, Community: watsons_woes, Gen, POV Character of Color, Prompt Fic, Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-24
Updated: 2014-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-10 04:23:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2010786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tonga has a different take on the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Black Cannibal

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2014 July Watson’s Woes Prompt #23, brought to you by [**gardnerhill**](http://gardnerhill.livejournal.com/): **Eat Raw Meat and Dance His War-Dance**. From the original ACD to modern-day adaptations, the treatment of non-white characters in Sherlock Holmes (examples including "The Sign of Four," "The Blind Banker") can be racially problematic if not downright racist. Here's your chance to "fix" such a portrayal, or to deal with the subject of race from any version of SH (Sally Donovan or Joan Watson might have an earful to tell you, or the two African-American protagonists of the comic-book series Watson and Holmes).

What a people the English are.

They come to our shores with their guns and take everything we have. They turn our very land into money – tea, tobacco, sugar. They make our people into slaves, our women into whores – and scorn to recognise their own children from such unions. They march into a country of the One God and Muhammad, and preach their Christ at gunpoint.

To make a few more rupees of profit selling cheap cloth back to those who grew and harvested the cotton for it, they chop the thumbs off India’s best weavers, and a priceless art form that has existed for centuries is gone in a generation.

They keep prisoners on our land, and hunt us for fun when they are not greedily raiding our palaces, enslaving us to work their plantations, and forcing us to eat their pork.

When we righteously protest, we are a mob. When we try to take back what is ours, we are mutinous. And when we fight back in self-defence, we are labeled “savages.”

This treasure is mine, mine and my friend Small’s. For the sake of my lost people, I abase myself for money. But soon I will take back what is ours, strike a blow for justice against the white thieves, and die fighting them.

Oh, the English. Barbarians!


End file.
